New details revealed on lead-up to Nova Scotia shootings,
Newly uncensored court documents describe violence in vivid detail
Warning: This article contains disturbing details.
Lisa Banfield and Gabriel Wortman were having drinks at his warehouse in Portapique, N.S., just across a wooded lot from his cottage on Portapique Beach Road.
It was the evening of April 18. It was their anniversary. They weren’t married, but they’d been together for 19 years. They had FaceTimed some friends in Houlton, Maine, planning ahead to next year, when they were talking about having a commitment ceremony to mark their 20th anniversary.
One of the friends in Maine said, “Don’t do it.”
It isn’t clear what motivated the comment — whether the friend knew of Wortman’s history of abusing Banfield or not. What is clear is that the comment upset Banfield.
That’s when an evening that had apparently started in celebration spiralled into a night of violence and abuse that gave birth to what would become Canada’s worst mass shooting.
Details in newly uncensored court documents lay out in vivid detail the beginning of the violence of that night. The documents were among those filed by the RCMP in the days following the April massacre in northeastern Nova Scotia so the Mounties could obtain search warrants to aid in their investigation. They include a statement given to police by Banfield herself.
Banfield told police she was upset her friend had told her not to go through with the commitment ceremony.
She said she was leaving.
Wortman got angry.
Halfway to their cottage on Portapique Beach Road, Banfield said, she’d felt bad about leaving and returned to the warehouse.
But it was too late … Wortman was already furious.
She left again, went home to the cottage and went to bed. At some point later, she said, Wortman came home, ripped the blankets off her and started to beat her. He told her to get dressed, the documents say. “It’s done,” he said.
He poured gasoline around the inside of the cottage and told Banfield to grab one of the guns there. They started to walk back to the warehouse so he could burn that, too.
He made her walk in front of him. She promised she’d stay behind him, but he wasn’t buying that. He pulled her shoes off her feet.
She got loose and started running, but she tripped and Wortman picked her up by the hair and started dragging her toward the warehouse. He tried to handcuff her, but only got one handcuff on and then began shooting at the ground around her.
Banfield told police she begged Wortman not to kill her. He fired the gun he was carrying again, then put her in the back of a police car he’d modified to resemble an RCMP vehicle. He went upstairs in the warehouse.
Banfield struggled. She tried to kick out the windows of the car, to no avail. But she eventually managed to pry open the partition separating the back seat from the front and crawled out that way. All of Wortman’s guns, she’d later tell authorities, were on the front seat of the car. She ran and hid in the woods. From the trees she heard a couple of men at a house on one of the nearby back roads, she said. There were gunshots. Then there was silence.
Then the house went up in flames.
She hid there, in the woods, on a night where temperatures flirted with the freezing mark, until morning. She’d had a jacket, but had discarded it during her flight, hoping the police would find it.
In the morning, she crawled out to the road and knocked on Leon Joudrey’s door — the first house she could see. He called the police.
By morning light, the carnage had become visible. Thirteen of her neighbours were dead. Houses were burning. And Wortman — dressed as a Mountie and driving a replica police car — was long gone.
Nine other people, for a total of 22 victims, would die before police caught up with him. Some randomly — a woman walking along the side of the road, two nurses driving down the same piece of road in Debert — others seemingly targeted — two correctional officers living up in Wentworth, a 50-kilometre drive from Portapique. Wortman killed them both, along with a neighbour who happened by, and set their home on fire.
A consortium of media organizations both national and local — including the Halifax Chronicle Herald and Halifax Examiner — have been before the courts for months, seeking first to have RCMP search warrant requests released, and then to have redacted portions revealed.
At another recently unredacted point in the documents, a carpenter who had apparently lived on Wortman’s property told police that Wortman and Banfield had separate bedrooms and claimed he once heard them arguing about Wortman putting a gun to her head. The same witness also told police Wortman had two crates of grenades he got from the U.S.
Today, Lisa Banfield is one of three people who stand accused of unlawfully transferring ammunition between March 17, 2020 and April 18, 2020. James Banfield and Brian Brewster were charged along with her in early December. Police have said none of the accused had any foreknowledge of Wortman’s rampage. To date those are the only charges brought since the investigation into the Portapique killings began.
In the wake of the shootings, federal and provincial governments have launched a public inquiry to investigate the events and police response before, during and after the killings.
The three commissioners on the inquiry panel are expected to produce an interim report by May 2022, with a final report in November of the same year.